Okey, I’ve been struggling with this alot inside of Cubase 7.
It’s about modulation.
In DAWs like Ableton and upcoming Bitwig you have insane modulation capabilities. In lets say Ableton or Bitwig you have these built-in-stock plugins which comes with the DAW that makes it sooo handy to modulate stuff. For example I could attach an LFO or envelope to the filter or a frequency shifter that changes/morphs the sound completely inside of Ableton.
How do I do this in Cubase 7/how would you guys go on about doing this?
An example of what I mean, here’s a video:
Like in this video. They go totally mad about modulating everything. That’s what I want to do aswell. I want to modulate the sh*t ouf of stuff and really go nuts.
So HOW do I do this in Cubase 7? it’s one of the few things I simply think that Cubase 7 lacks, or it’s my knowledge about it existing inside of Cubase 7 that is lacking
Any tips and tricks and how-to-do this is highly appreciated!
not possible natively, possible via virtual midi ports, but clunky, hard to set up, inconsistent results, and audio buffer-size-dependant; see my posts here for instance: Custom Macro Control - Cubase - Steinberg Forums (i can eg. extract the envelope of my kick drum and use it to modulate a cutoff on a synth as well as for instance the wet parameter of a reverb, but there is high latency and the result is slightly different with each run; also takes minutes to set up initially, and then a long time still once the midi ports are up and running.)
certainly an area that should be looked into, the whole ‘tape machine’ stiff feel of the daw.
not possible natively, possible via virtual midi ports, but clunky, hard to set up, inconsistent results, and audio buffer-size-dependant; see my posts here for instance: > Custom Macro Control - Cubase - Steinberg Forums > (i can eg. extract the envelope of my kick drum and use it to modulate a cutoff on a synth as well as for instance the wet parameter of a reverb, but there is high latency and the result is slightly different with each run; also takes minutes to set up initially, and then a long time still once the midi ports are up and running.)
certainly an area that should be looked into, the whole ‘tape machine’ stiff feel of the daw.
indeed it really sucks that Cubase and steinberg is quite much behind when it comes to modulation…
Please Steinberg, in 7.5 can we please have some modulation macros or something! that would be awsome. That’s actually the ONLY thing I miss in cubase. I see now why people use Ableton and are so excited about the new Bitwig.
While I’d rather they improved a few things that don’t work so well, I think a comprehensive modulation facility throughout that could modulate anything and could itself be modulated and automated would be a giant killer feature that I’d use a lot.
I know it’s not in house but I use sugar bytes Turnado for modulating like this which is completely recordable and even better it’s completely automapped
this would be something else; you couldn’t use turnado’s parameter to modulate another parameter within the DAW.
FL studio for instance even allows for FM modulation of automation. you can have an LFO automation curve modulate another automation curve. and assign that to the BPM of the project for instance. that’s creative right there. ;-]
This is what I’m talking about. Why is steinberg so much behind on this front? Even logic invented the macro controls in their new release of Logic Pro X… so now you can basically do these things in logic aswell, or atleast control several parameters with just 1 knob.
In Cubase you can only assign 1 target to 1 knob, which is like basic automation but abit easier. To be honest - it’s good… but, it’s SOOOOO limited. It really is a shame that its so limited. No modulation freedom here…
This gets said time and time again on this forum . Cubase does things the other DAW’s can’t ,now do you want to make Cubase more complex ? do you want a stable Cubase ? Do you want to have to run the top of the range computer just to be able to handle Cubase with all the features you require ?
The more complex the program the more unstable it’s likely to be and then you will be on the forum complaining about stability and performance issues.
I think it’s best for each daw to stay with their own code .
It would be a pretty boring DAW world where every daw can do what every other daw can do .
Stability should come before everything else and if another daw is stable doing the modulation you require then use that program ,Cubase is an completely different beast and im glad it is
so you think that writing more code to integrate this functionality into Cubase is just so easy to do ?. Your talking about modulating all parameters , im no computer expert but to me that is one hell of a function that could potentially IF not implemented right have very dangerous side fx’s
Cubase is great for MIDI and audio, but a failure as a creative mixing platform. FL Studio is great for mixing and modulation, but miserable for MIDI and audio editing.
Logic has no edge, though. There’s no reason to use it if you have any combination of another two or more DAWs.
I agree that having deeper modulation facilities would be great but using automation lanes and drawing in curves seems to work perfectly fine for me (although it’s a little unstable sometimes, causing Cubase to crash occasionally) and I make Techno.
I don’t think Steinberg’s code-base is written to handle modulations very well because even Halion 5’s mod matrix is limited in the number of connections that can be made (can’t be connected to insert FX, does not show graphical cues of mods currently happening).
But automation lanes suffice for my needs. It would be cool to have completely hands-free mods, but even that would be limited IMO.
It’s pretty much a pain in the butt to set up selective band ducking in Cubase, as the multi-band compressor doesn’t accept a sidechain input. There’s a whole lot of rigamarole to jury-rig a solution that’s fairly unintuitive to tweak on the fly.
I think something as simple as being able to build a dynamic EQ would be suitable enough for anyone. Peak controller → EQ band gain. Make a handful of audio and formula-driven modulation controllers and let any parameter be a target. What’s not to love about those possibilities?
anyway-- you can just think of it as though you wrote all the automation nodes yourself (which is the only way at the moment anyway). does automation crash cubase? if not, it will be no different to if that same automation data were created by a macro control / automatic parameter modulation.
(if it does, there’s deeper code issues, not related to how the automation data is conceived in the first place.)
there are vsti lfo’s or the xfer lfo tool that will send out midi cc data – but not every plugin [parameter] is midi cc-automatable (plus the assigning process is terrible). this is a feature-set that needs to be implemented natively, anything else will be very compromised and half-baked. steinberg is unfortunately tending to the tape machine paradigm of a daw still. they could at least copy logic’s new macro controls for starters.
It would definitely be nice to have something like that, but like I said, I don’t think Steinberg’s codebase can support such complex routing. For them to add such functionality would probably mean they would have to rewrite everything from the ground up, which I don’t think will happen anytime soon.
You guys are dreaming if you think you’ll ever get Steiny to do something like this…
